March 22, 2006
Can you read without using your inner voice?:
Inspired by science ninja Ben Goldacre's debunking of Brain Gym, I have before me a copy of the second book in "The Mind Gym" series, subtitled 'Give Me Time'.
One way to save time, the authors suggest, is to read more quickly. To do that they firstly suggest reading without using your inner voice.
"When we first learnt to read we were encouraged to speak the words aloud so that our teacher could check that we'd got each one right before we moved on. As we mature, we internalise that voice, so we still hear it in our heads. But this inner voice is not necessary in our reading; in fact it reduces our reading speed to around talking speed..."
Now the only time I can read without hearing the words in my head is when I'm not really attending to what I'm reading - you know those occasions when you keep having to read the same paragraph over and over because you're not paying attention. You're reading the words but their meaning just isn't going in because you're not listening to what you're reading. But that's just my take - what do you think? Can you read without listening to the words in your head?
Their second suggestion for reading more quickly is to stop using saccades - the rapid jerky movements evolved over eons as a perfect way to re-orient our gaze and attention quickly and efficiently - something touched on in Hack 15 of Mind Hacks.
Mind Gym suggest running a pointer smoothly under the line that you're reading:
"A pointer helps our eyes focus on what we are reading, thereby reducing the number of eye jumps we make".
Now this is something I know a little bit about, and I think what they've suggested is completely wrong. Using a pointer in such a way allows you to engage in smooth pursuit eye movements that are usually impossible to perform in the absence of a moving target. But their function is to allow us to focus on moving objects (in this case the pointer), not still words on a page. So if you perform smooth pursuit against a stationary background (words on a page) that will cause those words to blur and you won't be able to read them properly. Saccadic eye movements on the other hand allow your eyes to jump to new fixation positions along the line and actually focus on the words you want to read. There's a huge body of research looking at optimal reading strategies in terms of number of saccadic fixations and investigations of how wide the area of processing is at each landing position. Nowhere - so far as I can tell - do the eye movement experts find that people can read without fixating. In fact the evidence suggests skilled readers are distinctive in the greater number of backward glances they make as quoted here from an article by Matthew S. Starr and Keith Rayner in Trends in Cognitive Sciences:
"Although it might seem as if our eyes sweep smoothly across the page as we read, in reality, reading consists of a series of saccades (whereby the eyes jump from one location to another)and fixations (during which the eyes remain relatively stable). For skilled readers, the average saccade length is 7–9 letter spaces and the average fixation duration is 200–250 ms. About 10–15% of the time, skilled readers make ‘regressions’ back to previously read text".
Link to 2001 abstract on controversies in the study of eye movements during reading.
Link to recent BPS Research Digest entry "Against speed reading".
